Most of what you’ll read here is life and fun, with episodes from my past, amusing and serious. But I have an unwelcome stranger lodged in my brain, as you’ll find if you explore my stories. Our destinies are interlocked, but its deadly presence reminds me every minute that each day of life is a miracle. This is my space to reflect on life, and an interactive area where we can share our experiences freely. Without you, this blog has no reason for existence. Carpe Diem!

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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

"Taste the soup!"

.It's always fascinated me that every culture group has its own brand of humour. Sometimes a joke is so culture bound that it is incomprehensible to outsiders.

I remember being in Taiwan with a group of Taiwanese students and we began telling jokes. It was clear that while many of them are universal, several just didn't cross the culture barrier. Some of their own jokes were uproariously funny to them, but not to us. Some of ours were also funny for them, but others were clearly mystifying.

In Korea on that same trip, it seemed that all the jokes were compatible, though I admit that there were plentiful supplies of soju at that dinner, and the things that amused us highly first time round might not have stood up very well to the retelling on the next morning.

Sufi humour is also well known. I have a whole book of it. Sometimes I find that the stories are the same as Zen ones, but as both are in the mystical tradition, that is hardly surprising. Russian and Polish humour have their own edge as well.

Yet somehow Jewish humour cuts across all boundaries. Maybe we just get to see so much of it on American sitcoms. This one, from Leo Rosten's The New Joys of Yiddish tickled my fancy.

The book was given to me by my friends Carl and Joan. Well, in my cracked memory I thought it was Joan who'd brought it, but Tracey assures me that it was Carl who did, so there you go. I seem to recall the harder I think about it that she's right, as I now have a clear memory of it – maybe a reinvented one, as she described just where he was, next to my bookcase, at the time he gave it to me.
Memory does that.

Anyway, here's a tiny example, based on the way 'Aha!' is used in Yiddish.

Postscript: we were just now watching a TV show with Bernadette Peters in it.. "How old do you think she is?" I asked, having just consulted the oracle.

"Old!" Tracey said. "I've been watching her in musicals since I was little."

There was a pause.

"She's just a couple of months younger than I am," I said, in mock-injury at her comment.

i remember being told, as i plunged through six years of schoolgirl French, that there are two ways to tell if you are fluent in a second language: 1. you dream in that language, and 2. you can tell a joke in that language … managed the first but never the second! xt

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Former historian in Asian studies, comparative religions, movie-maker and observer of the world as we have changed it. I’m now dealing with a GBM (4): the most aggressive form of brain tumour. It should have got me months/years ago, but we’ve fought it and I’m still here! I aim to use this experience to try to illuminate life as well as demystify the journey. Twitter: @deniswright